Wikipedia - unreliable or revolutionary?

Sir,

I'd like to make a couple of comments on Mr. Hogan's Bytegeist about how Wikipedia falls into the trap of asserting that every point of view is equally valid. There's been quite a lot of debate about Wikipedia recently. A few days before  reading Mr. Hogan's piece I happened to hear Wikipedia discussed in NPR's call in show Talk of The Nation, and one person that phoned in, a professor who routinely takes points off of his students for citing Wikipedia as a source, talked about the same principal drawback that is mentioned in the Bytegeist, namely that unlike traditional encyclopedias where every entry gets reviewed by a panel of experts, the articles in Wikipedia are open for editing by just about anyone.

So people in general, and the learned folk in particular, seem to be comparing Wikipedia to an ordinary encyclopedia over and over again and that's where, imho, they completely miss the point. Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia; rather it's a totally new phenomenon that so far can only be referred to by its proper name, a new class of thing unto itself.

Here's the crux of this new phenomenon the way I see it. Back in the days when centralized media ruled supreme, we ordinary people were immature consumers of information. Now it has obviously come time for us to grow and mature and finally remember that we're supposed to be capable of critical thinking and judging between useful information and bull and this is where the equality of validity of all viewpoints, as far as their presentation is concerned, just might come in handy.

Enter Wikipedia. You want to read about the Holocaust and you wind up on a revisionist website. Political correctness naturally goes down the chute but isn't it where it belongs anyway? It's raw, it's often inaccurate and incorrect but, unlike the traditional scientist-reviewed encyclopedias, Wikipedia doesn't claim to be always accurate and correct. It sure claims to be striving in that direction and it's teaching us all a lesson in the process, a lesson which can be roughly summed up as: trust no one and check your sources.

In Wikipedia, unlike Britannica or Encarta and their likes, you can at least always look at the discussion page and trace the evolution of the article you just looked at, which can give you some idea as to how much you can trust this information.

With Encarta and Britannica you just have to assume that all the articles in them underwent adequate reviewing and checking. And then you go on and take the next logical step of assuming that the information presented in them is correct and accurate. Question is, though, whether it is always correct and accurate, especially when it comes to rather obscure subjects.

I remember reading an article on the BBC website, not so long ago, about a UK kid who accidentally found several factual errors in Britannica. They all had to do with his pet subject which was some marine forms of life. So it would seem that oftentimes the only difference between Britannica and Wikipedia is that people tend to trust the former more because they know considerably less about how its articles get written. Sure they know about scientists and professors, all these heaps of expert authority, but the bottom line is that with traditional encyclopedias we're basically told to shut up and just take all the info in them at face value. That professor in Talk of The Nation never mentioned ever taking points off his students for citing Britannica as a source.

Wikipedia, on the other hand lays the whole process bare, for everyone to see. Sure you can get a biased article but you can always look at the history of changes and be warned, while in an ordinary encyclopedia no history of changes is available. If a revered academic brought in to review articles on a particular subject happens to be biased then chances are the articles he reviews will end up being biased as well, but the readers won't even know what hit them, they'll just assume that this bias is the most valid point of view.

Wikipedia, on the other hand, is revolutionizing the way we consume information, it's teaching us to take everything with a grain of salt rather than at face value, sort of turning us from a gullible biomass into  a community of thinking individuals. Of course thinking is a process that takes an effort, the kind of effort that a lot of mass media brainwashed people are no longer in the habit of making. So we get all these people, students that go and cite it as a source, taking it to be just another encyclopedia, which it isn't.

In any case I think it's a step in the right direction, in a way it's the Prometheus of the Information Age, along with blogs, they're taking information from the information gods, centralized media companies, and giving it freely to the common folk and in this context all viewpoints are valid. And it's not about replacing traditional encyclopedias either; rather it's about providing an alternative. After all nobody forces you to use it.     

Igor Faslyeff

Mojo Rising

Sir,

As I do every day, I checked your RSS and noticed the Doc Mojo interview. I just thought I'd write to say thank you for publishing it. Though I'll never in my wildest dreams be able to afford it, MojoWorld looks absolutely fascinating (the interview wasn't half bad either <g>)

Steven Burn
Ur I.T. Mate Group
www.it-mate.co.uk

WordPress Woes

Sir,

Thanks for the guide to installing WordPress. Especially the bit about running it on a PC. I’ve been trying to figure out how to do this for weeks! I got to exactly the same point you did when all I could see was a list of files in the wp-admin directory - but it wasn’t until I saw the article in Bitwise that I figures out what to do next. Good work! Now how about some articles on installing some of the big CMS systems like Drupal and Typo3?

Daniel Wilson

Lock Picking

Sir,

I thought I'd mention that the following code in your article which obtains an exclusive lock is now deemed to be bad practice (this is according to Microsoft, although it's in some of their documentation too!!)

SyncLock GetType(CommControl)

This is because it locks the Global Type Object which can be even be shared across App domains, so increasing the chances of deadlock. This article explains. It's recommended to create a global static/shared object within your class and lock that object instead. Thanks for the interesting article anyway.

Ray Tortorella